The Sea Around Us

"This was a chance discovery. I had always thought of Rachel Carson as an environmental activist—a very effective one—on DDT and other issues. And then suddenly, I flipped through the pages of this book that I found on a market store, and found that it’s wonderful. It’s a popular science book about the oceans as they were known in the early 1950s, when they were just beginning to be understood. It’s beautifully written: it’s poetic, evocative, and creates an air of mystery. It still deserves reading today. You can enjoy it, and then you can read a more up-to-date book to answer some of the queries that she posed in the book. For instance, she was writing before the idea of continental drift and plate tectonics had become accepted. So there are speculations on how ancient the landscape was beneath the oceans. One can read her puzzlement with pleasure. And a lot of the science—the biological parts, the oceanographic parts, the history of ocean research—still holds up very well. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Carson takes a scientific idea, and expresses it in way that captures the imagination. This passage is typical of her writing. Here, she was posing a question that had been posed before. As the Earth is very old, and sediment is being routed all the time from the land to the sea, how is it that the sea isn’t full of sediment? When she was writing, she could not know the answer to that question, which is that the oceans are being steadily pushed deep into the earth, together with the sediment that covers them. So, the ocean floor is much younger than we thought it was: it is not more than a couple of hundred million years old. She wasn’t aware of the revolution in geological knowledge to come, but she was already thinking through the implications of sedimentation as it was then understood."